History Learning Outcomes

History is the study of the rich and diverse human experience across place and time as constructed and interpreted through human artifacts, written evidence, and oral traditions. It requires empathy for historical actors, respect for interpretive debate, and thoughtful consideration of evidence which challenges one’s own view or understanding of the past.

To study history is to communicate with others in order to make the past accessible and to preserve the past regardless of historical evidence which may be difficult, challenging, and uncomfortable to one’s own view or understanding of the past.  The critical study of the past through careful and considered analysis of evidence is essential to active and informed citizenship.

Professional ethics and standards of the discipline of history demand peer review, citation, and acceptance of the provisional nature of knowledge.

Graduates are expected to meet the following benchmarks as History Majors: maintain a 2.0 GPA or higher in their courses; acquire foundational knowledge of the process to study history; apply concepts and theories related to history to a disciplinary and scholarly project; and successfully complete a capstone project in History.

Learning Outcomes of the History Major

History majors will demonstrate the following skills and competencies upon successful graduation:

  1. Build and acquire historical knowledge
    1. Gather and contextualize information in order to convey both the particularity of past lives and the scale of human experience.
    2. Recognize how humans in the past exercised agency and shaped their own unique historical moments while also being shaped by those moments.
    3. Develop a body of historical knowledge with breadth of time and place—as well as depth of detail—in order to discern context.
    4. Distinguish the past from our very different present, while recognizing the impact of varying interpretations of the past on our present.
  2. Develop historical methods
    1. Recognize history as an interpretive account of the human past—one that historians create in the present from surviving evidence.
    2. Collect, sift, organize, question, synthesize, and interpret complex and diverse types of source material.
    3. Practice ethical historical inquiry that makes use of and acknowledges both primary and secondary sources.
    4. Develop empathy toward people in the context of their distinctive historical moments.
    5. Develop skills and methods to critically analyze sources for bias, audience, context and historical validity.
  3. Recognize the provisional nature of knowledge, the essential value of complexity, and ambiguity that history requires.
    1. Welcome contradictory perspectives and data, which enable us to provide more accurate accounts and construct stronger arguments.
    2. Describe past events from multiple perspectives.
    3. Explain and justify multiple causes of complex events and phenomena using conflicting sources.
    4. Identify, summarize, appraise, and synthesize other scholars’ historical arguments.
  4. Apply the range of skills it takes to decode the historical record because of its incomplete, complex, and contradictory nature
    1. Research and consider a variety of historical sources for credibility, position, perspective, and relevance.
    2. Evaluate historical arguments, explaining how they were constructed and might be improved.
    3. Revise analyses and narratives when new evidence requires it.
  5. Create historical arguments and narratives
    1. Generate substantive, open-ended questions about the past and develop research strategies to answer them.
    2. Craft and communicate well-supported historical narratives, arguments, and reports of research findings in a variety of media for a variety of audiences.
  6. Use historical perspective as central to active citizenship
    1. Apply historical knowledge and historical thinking to contemporary issues.
    2. Develop positions that reflect deliberation, cooperation, and diverse perspectives.

Adapted from the American Historical Association